“Abajo Los Chinos”: Race and the Public Sphere in Revolutionary Mexico

When the Mexican republic erupted in revolution in 1910, its competing leaders often used the language of mestizo nationalism to rally supporters. References to a populist mestizo nationalism gestured towards the emergence of the democratic principles of a public sphere. Historians have attributed the success of revolutionary Mexican nationalism to state ideologies of mestizaje and populist agrarian reforms. However, the history of Mexico’s anti-Chinese politics reveals that racism has played an unappreciated role in the creation of a public sphere in which the common good of mestizos became thinkable. In this lecture, JasonChang details the ways that racial violence, anti-Chinese organizations, and racist policies contributed to the expansion of mestizo nationalism. This revisionist history highlights the ways that race was an essential technology of state formation that undergirded the transformation of rule and consent after the revolution.

Combining Asian American Studies and Latin American Studies, Jason Chang’s research focuses on the history of Asian diasporas in the Americas and the different systems of race and gender they encounter and become a part of. These histories of migration, settlement and racialization are representative of his interests in the broader geo-historical formations that have linked Asia and the Americas since the sixteenth century.

Presented as part of B/ordering Violence: Boundaries, Gender, Indigeneity in the Americas, a John E. Sawyer Seminar in Comparative Cultures generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and co-sponsored by the Latin American & Caribbean Studies program, the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, & Sexuality (WISER).

William Nericcio 2/28/2013
“Confessions of a Mexican American Hoarder” or “Prowling the Caucasian Bestiary”: The Existential and Insane Consequences of Collecting Latina/o Artifacts and Stereotypeshttps://tegr.it/y/199×0

Bringing the Land to the Fight: Biotechnology and Hawaiian Ontology
Noenoe Silva (Political Science, University of Hawai’i, Manoa) and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller (Social Sciences, Public Policy Center, University of Hawai’i, Manoa) examine current political struggles of native Hawaiians over the increasing presence of biotechnology corporations in Hawai’i. Biotechnology depends upon conditions that facilitate genetically modified organism (GMO) research and profit from ever-increasing production of genetically modified organisms. Legal regimes of property recognize new organisms that can be controlled, sold, and exploited; analogously, multiculturalist policies recreate identity through denial of indigeneity, refusing land claims by indigenous people that would interfere with biotechnology industries. This impacts Hawaiians’ ability to survive on the land and to (re)create a Hawaiian world, which would include native species, many of them kino lau or native deities. We consider Hawaiian ideas of kalo, for example, as kin and sacred anc! estor, and other plants, animals, and natural elements as kino lau or body forms of deities, as crucial elements in the struggle against further colonization and towards a resurgence of native lifeways.

Indigenous Approaches to Critical Animal Studies and the New Materialisms?
Kimberly Tallbear (Environmental Sciences, University of California, Berkeley) highlights what indigenous thought has to offer academic theorizing as new critical fields work to dismantle hierarchies in the relationships of “westerners” with their non-human others. For example, “multi-species ethnography” now studies humans and their relations with nonhuman-beings such as dogs, bears, cattle, monkeys, bees, mushrooms, and microorganisms. But the starting points of these inquiries can only partially contain indigenous standpoints. Indigenous peoples never forgot that nonhumans are agential beings engaged in social relations that profoundly shape human lives. Moreover, their non-human others may not even be understood as living. “Objects” and “forces” such as stones, thunder, or stars are known within our ontologies to be sentient and knowing persons. Indigenous approaches also critique settler colonialism and its management of non-human others, linking violenc! e against animals to violence against particular humans historically accorded less-than-human or animal status.

Presented as part of B/ordering Violence: Boundaries, Gender, Indigeneity in the Americas, a John E. Sawyer Seminar in Comparative Cultures generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and co-sponsored by the Latin American & Caribbean Studies program, the Jackson School of International Studies, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, & Sexuality (WISER).
For more on the B/ordering Violence Seminar Series, visit depts.washington.edu/uwch/programs/initiatives/bordering-violence and www.borderingviolence.com.

]]>http://blogs.uw.edu/borders/2013/05/21/borders-of-kinship-speciesraceindigeneity/feed/1Symposium: Empires of Capital: Race Across the Atlantic and the Pacific, May 17-18http://blogs.uw.edu/borders/2013/05/14/symposium-empires-of-capital-race-across-the-atlantic-and-the-pacific-may-17-18/
http://blogs.uw.edu/borders/2013/05/14/symposium-empires-of-capital-race-across-the-atlantic-and-the-pacific-may-17-18/#commentsTue, 14 May 2013 18:45:08 +0000http://blogs.uw.edu/borders/?p=347Continue reading →]]>May 17 and 18, 2013
University of Washington, Seattle

The two-day symposium seeks to theorize and historicize racial capitalism in the modern world. Building on Cedric Robinson’s insight that capitalist development has been pursued and organized fundamentally around race, speakers will strive to uncover the multiple layers of capitalist expansion—ideological, cultural, economic, and social—to reveal and comprehend the tensions and contradictions of racial capitalism in the past and in the present and across the Atlantic and the Pacific.

3:30 – 5:00 p.m. Session 1
Jennifer Morgan, New York University, “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Slave Law and the History of Women in Slavery”
Michael Witgen, University of Michigan, “Seeing Red: The Politics of Crime and Punishment on the Northern Borderlands of the Early American Republic”

*If you will be joining us for a light lunch on Saturday, please RSVP to cspn@uw.edu or 206-543-8656 by Tuesday, May 14.

Sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, the University of Washington Libraries, the Department of History, the Department of English, the Jackson School of International Studies, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities.

Comunidades afectadas por la minería: el caso CONACAMI y su impacto en América
In November 1998, community leaders from the Peruvian Andes came together in a seminar to discuss the effects of mining in their communities. This could have simply been one more meeting, but the conclusions and agreements of this historic gathering opened a new chapter in the long struggle of Andean communities to defend their rights against the mining industry and state mining policies. This new stage is marked by the leadership of the National Confederation of Communities Affected by Mining in Peru (Confederación Nacional de Comunidades del Perú Afectadas por la Minería – CONACAMI) and the emergence of a movement to denounce the negative impacts of mining and organize opposition to it. This movement is considered one of the iconic articulations of resistance to mining in Latin America. Its most important contribution is generating a public debate over the impacts and benefits of mining.

Luis Vittor is a Peruvian economist and adviser to the Coordinadora Andina de Organizaciones Indígenas (Andean Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations). He has also advised the Confederación de Comunidades del Perú Afectadas por la Minería (CONACAMI, the Confederation of Peruvian Communities Affected by Mining) since its founding. He is of Quechua origin and was born in Cerro de Pasco, Peru. From 2008-2009 he was a Fellow in the Indigenous Peoples, Human Rights, Governance & International Cooperation program at the University Carlos III of Madrid (Spain). He is the author of Resistencias comunitarias a la minería: la experiencia de CONACAMI (Community Resistance to Mining: the CONACAMI experience) (2008) among numerous other publications.
Presentation will be in Spanish with English translation by José Antonio Lucero (Latin American and Caribbean Studies).

Presented as part of B/ordering Violence: Boundaries, Gender, Indigeneity in the Americas, a John E. Sawyer Seminar in Comparative Cultures generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and co-sponsored by the Latin American & Caribbean Studies program, the Jackson School of International Studies, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, & Sexuality (WISER).
For more on the B/ordering Violence Seminar Series, visit depts.washington.edu/uwch/programs/initiatives/bordering-violence and www.borderingviolence.com.

Borderlands Graduate Student Coffee hour with Audra Simpson and Ofelia Zepeda. Come meet Profs. Simpson and Zepeda for an informal chat with other graduate students interested in borderlands research.

Presented as part of B/ordering Violence: Boundaries, Gender, Indigeneity in the Americas, a John E. Sawyer Seminar in Comparative Cultures generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and co-sponsored by the Latin American & Caribbean Studies program, the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, & Sexuality (WISER).

Haudenosaunee – or “The Iroquois” – are an Indigenous Confederacy of Six Nations that interrupt the narratives that attempts to explain them as well as the states that purport to lawfully own and administer their land. Nowhere is this made clearer than in Iroquois interpretations of the Jay Treaty of 1794 and Iroquois movement across the US-Canada border—an international border that cuts through their historical and contemporary territory and is, simply, in their space and in their way. It is through their actions, and in particular, their mobility on their own terms, that Indigenous border crossers enact their understandings of history and law, understandings that are then received in particular ways – racializing, criminalizing, and delimiting. Nonetheless, Haudenosaunee push against all of this as they move across various borders: territorial, temporal and juridical, in their active relationships to land and to each other. Audra Simpson explores the historica! l, legal, political and ethnographic life of Iroquois nationhood across borders, and contends that their continued life and action calls into deep question the conceit of territorial certainty and settler sovereignty itself.

Ofelia Zepeda (American Indian Studies, University of Arizona) “The Tohono O’odham and the Border: A Personal Perspective”

Ofelia Zepeda is a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation. She contends, “Early on we were not really aware of an international border since movement between the U.S. and Mexico was fairly free, especially for the Tohono O’odham. The understanding of a political border is something fairly recent and does not come into play when one moves with family and kin back and forth in this desert space, where the political border is situated is all one great extension of a people’s home, culture, language and land. This in a sense is my perspective as a member of the O’odham Nation. But, things have changed.” In her talk, she shares her personal perspective, moving back and forth from the time before the true realization of a border and today when things are magnified by the border.
Presented as part of B/ordering Violence: Boundaries, Gender, Indigeneity in the Americas, a John E. Sawyer Seminar in Comparative Cultures generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and co-sponsored by the Latin American & Caribbean Studies program, the Jackson School of International Studies, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, & Sexuality (WISER).
For more on the B/ordering Violence Seminar Series, visit depts.washington.edu/uwch/programs/initiatives/bordering-violence and www.borderingviolence.com.

Fandango jarocho is a four-hundred-year-old tradition from Veracruz, Mexico born from the encounter between European, Indigenous, African, and Arab cultures. After being canonized by the Mexican government, El Nuevo Movimiento Jaranero reclaimed the musical celebration of fandango in the 1970’s as a space for community transformation and empowerment. Over the last twenty years, Chicano and Mexican communities in the U.S. have engaged with communities in Veracruz to use fandango as a technology for community building and social justice that transcends national borders.

The Seattle Fandango Project joins this movement by using the fandango to build and transform community. As a technology (in the analog), fandango contains protocols within dance, music, verse, and participation that provide new channels of communication, connection, and understanding. People find themselves through musical interaction with others, and both individually and communally realize new possibilities and ways of being. This is convivencia, to convene and coexist. Once people leave fandango, this new sense of self carries over to other parts of their lives.

Please join the Seat­tle Fan­dango Project and Union Cul­tural Cen­ter in a con­ver­sa­tion about com­mu­nity music as a site of resis­tance and healing. Potluck style This event is free and all ages. Dona­tions grate­fully accepted.

Fea­tur­ing scholar and dancer, Raquel Rivera; Chican@ Artivist@s Martha Gon­za­lez (who is also a doc­toral can­di­date in Fem­i­nist Stud­ies at UW) and Quet­zal Flo­res of the Grammy award win­ning East L.A. band, Quet­zal; and Kali Niño, fan­dan­guera of Toronto and San Andres Tuxt­las and mem­ber of Cafe con Pan.